Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel

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  6. Participatory Allocation

Power always acts destructively, for its possessors are ever striving to lace all phenomena of social life into a corset of their laws to give them a definite shape. Its mental expression is dead dogma; its physical manifestation of life, brute force. This lack of intelligence in its endeavors leaves its imprint likewise on the persons of its representatives, gradually making them inferior and brutal, even though they were originally excellently endowed. Nothing dulls the mind and the soul of man as does the eternal monotony of routine, and power is essentially routine.

 -Rudolf Rocker

Nationalism and Culture

People's lives are in turmoil. There is a sense of crisis for men as well as for women, and for children too. Do we have an idea or even a glimmering about how people can and should live, not as victims as in the past for women, nor as atoms just whirling around on their own trajectories, but as members of a human community and as moral agents in that community?

-Barbara Ehrenreich

 DSA pamphlet

 One may argue, while still remaining within the logic of the system, about who should tell people where they can build houses-the ministry, the plan­ ning office, or the municipality-but no one can question that somebody has to tell them where they can build without betraying the whole class ethos.

--George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi

 The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power

 There is ... only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

 -Immanuel Kant

 The Metaphysic of Morals

Society is no comfort to one not sociable.

-Shakespeare

 Cymbeline

... all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised....When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralizing. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realizing that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's secondhand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. "He who would be free," says a fine thinker, "must not conform." And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of overfed barbarism amongst us.

 --Oscar Wilde

The Soul of Man under Socialism

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture ... have simply made us all members of one class.

 -Edward Bellamy

Looking Backward

MARK: What about resources? How can your system properly value resources?

PE: Participatory allocation is designed to generate more accurate estimates of social costs and benefits than any other economy ever has-even though I probably attach less weight to efficiency than participation, equity, solidarity, etc., than any of you. Not only are our "indicative" prices the product of a social iterative process which your Austrian school of supporters, Cap, correctly points out is the only basis for arriving at reasonable estimates-but the social process is equitable due to job complex balancing and fair incomes and is also arranged by the use of councils at many levels to reflect the subtle mixture of private and social interests at stake in human economies. That's one reason indicative prices will more accurately estimate true social costs and benefits then Cap's or Mark's or Cent's prices. The other reason is that we provide participants in the social process of price estimation with qualitative data that improves human abilities to act knowledgeably. If that's not enough to shut you hypocrites up on the issue of rational prices, nothing ever will be.

CAP: You're good at knocking us around, but why won't the members of your boards cheat? It seems that every time anything happens the iteration facilitation boards are involved, and then during the year it seems the production and consumption updating facilitation boards become important. I'd like to have a cushy spot on one of those.

PE: Just how would you take advantage? Suppose you and a bunch of your cronies are all on a high-level lFB or UFB. Presumably, there are two approaches to cheating. You could enrich yourself by biasing outcomes in favor of someone willing to pay you off or you could simply bias outcomes in your own favor directly. The latter possibility could be trivially undone by guaranteeing that individuals don't handle data bearing on their own economic activities. But I think this is actually overkill since facilitation boards merely manipulate data and project hypothetical outcomes, which then serve as further data that producers and consumers use however they like. Facilitators do not decide anything. Anyhow, all their calculations and projections can be checked.

But let's assume a worst-case scenario. It's early in a planning process, the stage of determining collective consumption for a county, and an issue on the agenda is whether to construct a high-quality skating rink for county use. A group of citizens who are avid skaters, one of whom has a son who is a potential Olympian, are eager for the rink to be voted up. Others are opposed, but naturally the whole thing will hinge to a great extent on the amount of work required for the project. In such a situation, calculations can be very important. And duplication of efforts and oversight might be uneconomical, unlike in the case of national accounting. This is the participatory cheat's best chance.

So let's say you are on the relevant local board and you want to make a killing. You are clever and sure you can trick everybody into a report that understates the costs of the rink by 20 percent, more than enough to ensure that it will be passed. How you would do this, given that costs would have to be determined via inquiries to producers about their services and none of them would have any interest in lying is beyond me, but let's say you could pull it off.

 So you meet with John, whose son is the potential Olympian and

a few other skating fanatics and offer to sell your support for a price.

Now what? They can't offer money because they don't have any.

They only have their own personal "credit card" computers that

keep track of their consumption and allow easy accounting for

purposes of oversight and analysis by the UFBs. They could offer

personal services or they might offer to - submit consumption re­

quests that favor items you like and make presents of those items

to you, but that's about it. The absence of large income and wealth differentials and the non-existence of exchangeable money would make bribery rather difficult. Of course it isn't ruled out. They could also approach you rather than you them, and threaten you if you don't help them out. Are we reduced to debating this type of nonsense?

CAP: What a god awful lot of bureaucracy all that must add up to...

PE: Any comparison of the various facilitation boards I have described, many of which only operate part time, with the infinite paraphernalia of today's accountants, finance departments, insurance companies, stock exchanges, banks, lending agencies, and state bureaucracies of countless types, not to mention excessive advertising...

CAP: Why shouldn't I and my work mates exaggerate the human costs of work we do to win approval for a proposal to work fewer hours?

PE: But wouldn't similar companies' averages reveal your lie?

CAP: Let's say there are very few and we're all in it together. We meet in our industry council-an ideal setting for turning self-pity into plotting. Indeed, why wouldn't everyone do it?

PE: Take it further. My work mates and I can claim we can't produce much, and wait for more employees to be approved. But it's a lie, so we all loaf when the new employees show up. Alternatively, as you say, we can work hard and produce at a reasonable pace, but claim there are real hardships involved that make the work very burdensome so we should have to work fewer hours. Both these flummeries are possible. But they stand a reasonable chance of being detected. First, production units are held accountable for the resources they use-including the human resources they are assigned. It won't do to pretend that workers trained as electrical engineers can't accomplish much unless more are sent since every unit is effectively charged the value of electrical engineers elsewhere. If they aren't able to produce much of value in one workplace, they will end up being assigned elsewhere since the social benefit to social cost ratio of the unit will prove unacceptable.

Second, lying about work conditions will be revealed by workers voting with their feet. If all workers in the publishing industry conspire to perpetrate an official lie that publishing work is tough, even if they put it over on the planning system, unofficial word will leak out that things are cushy in publishing and the excess of applicants to openings will tip off job complex balancing committees that something is amiss.

In any case, though the system does have guards against these types of behavior due to its equity and solidarity inducing priorities, I suspect there won't be any generalized goofing off of the type you describe, only isolated instances. And I suspect the sum total of those isolated instances will come to a very small fraction of the interminable screwing around and active avoidance of getting things done that exists in workplaces where workers are lorded over and exploited by owners and managers and rightfully rebel against it. But then I have a much more complimentary view of human nature and of what people will be like in desirable, comfortable surroundings than you do. However, if you should prove closer to the mark, it would not be particularly difficult to create workplaces whose purpose was to examine other workplaces and assess jobs to make sure reports are accurate.

MARK: And if those workers cheat, too?

PE: Of course, if you assume as a starting point that given the chance everyone would rather take advantage of their neighbor than share with them in an equal, fulfilling social effort, then any participatory proposal can be ridiculed. But think about how little out-and-out dishonesty there is even in societies that debase people, offer every opportunity to cheat, and often celebrate cheating. After all, most of us don't even jump subway turn styles or ignore parking meters even when we know we can get away with it, or--even more indicative-fail to leave tips for waiters and waitresses at restaurants we will never return to.

People can't be motivated to work by the pleasure of contributing to the community and of doing a good job in a creative way when they have no control over their workplaces, know little about where their products go, don't determine the character of their output, and earn pitiful incomes. But by reversing all these relations we can bring people's sociability to the fore.

CENT: It's all well and good to discuss the process abstractly. We used to talk about central planning like that and it seemed like it would work flawlessly as well. But in practice there are so many unforeseen details and complexities. It seems to me your system is ill-equipped to handle those, to bend, to function efficiently...

PE: Perhaps some detailed descriptions will help. However, in thinking abstractly, as you say, about participatory planning, markets, and central planning, it seems to me that participatory planning is the most flexible and least internally inconsistent of the bunch. After all, markets are horrible at dealing with externalities, public goods, and ecological issues and thereby create grave contradictions for themselves even as they promote antisocial behavior by elevating competition and rewarding corruption. Similarly, central planning relies on units that are alienated and hierarchically organized and on actors most likely providing unreliable data and carrying out orders with something less than zeal.

But participatory planning calls forth the skills and attitudes people must have if the system is to yield optimal outcomes. It is internally consistent and generates calculations that account for externalities, public goods, and the overall qualitative development of the economy. Nonetheless, I can certainly understand your hesitance. After all, I know all we've done is talk abstractly. So let's see what the details of a planning process might look like.